ARSENAL v LIVERPOOL

(at Wembley) 11.4.87

And on the other hand, some days are just golden. My depression had gone completely now; all I could feel was the place where the ache had been, and that was a pleasurable sensation, just as when you are recovering from food poisoning and eating again, the soreness of the stomach muscles is pleasurable. I was six days off my thirtieth birthday, and I had the idea that everything had pulled round for me just in time; that thirty was the falls at the end of the river and if I had still been down when I got there I would have gone right over the edge. So I felt good about that, and Arsenal back at Wembley felt good, because with a young team and a new manager the Littlewoods Cup seemed like an unimaginably delicious hors d’oeuvre, rather than a meal in itself. I had just turned twenty-three when we were last all there together, and for me and the team, the seven intervening years had been unpredictably horrible; but now we had come out of the dark and into the light.

There was light, too, a glorious and gloriously apposite April sunshine. And though you are always aware of how it feels when the winter is over, however long that winter might have been, there is nothing like a football stadium, especially Wembley, to remind you, because you stand there in the shadowed dark looking down into the light, on to the brilliant lush green and it’s as if you are in a cinema watching a film about another and more exotic country. It was as sunny outside the stadium as in it, of course, but it didn’t seem that way, because of this trick football grounds have of using just a rectangle of the sunshine so that you can see it and understand it.

So there was all that already, even before the game started. And though we were playing Liverpool (admittedly Liverpool in one of their less mighty guises, pre-Beardsley and Barnes, but post-Dalglish, although he was their sub that day), and thus could only be expected to lose, I really had convinced myself that it wouldn’t matter, and that me being back, and the team being back, was enough. So when Craig Johnston put Rush through, and he paused for a moment, took his time, and smashed the ball neatly and authoritatively past our goalkeeper Lukic’s groping left hand, I was stung but not surprised, and determined not to let the goal and the defeat that was bound to follow spoil my recuperation or my new, springy optimism. But Charlie equalised before half-time, after he had hit the post and caused a massive scramble in the Liverpool penalty area; and in a wonderful second half of football, when both teams played with grace and skill and desire, our substitute, the poor, maligned Perry Groves, skipped past Gillespie, crossed, Charlie swung, the ball hit a defender and rolled gently past the deceived Grobbelaar and into the goal. It all seemed so languid, and the ball trundled in so slowly, that I feared that it would not have the strength to cross the line completely, or it would be cleared before the referee had spotted that it had indeed gone over, but in the end it found just enough puff to touch the net. Nicholas and Groves, one of whom had come from Celtic for nearly three-quarters of a million pounds, the other of whom had come from Colchester United for about one-fifteenth of that sum, ran behind the goal and did a little dance of joy, just the two of them, in front of us; they could not ever have imagined dancing together before, and they never would again, but there they were, yoked just for one tiny moment in the one-hundred-and-one-year history of the club by their unrepeatable and frankly fortuitous collaboration. And that is how Arsenal came to win the Littlewoods Cup, not the most prestigious trophy I know, but much more than Pete and I and the rest of us could have dared hope for two years previously. It was some kind of reward for blind persistence.

One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say that they would rather do than watch are missing the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing—not in the aerobic sense, because watching a game, smoking your head off while doing so, drinking after it has finished and eating chips on the way home is unlikely to do you a whole lot of Jane Fonda good, in the way that chuffing up and down a pitch is supposed to. But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team’s fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps at Wembley to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realise this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nonetheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me; and I say this fully aware that the club exploits me, disregards my views, and treats me shoddily on occasions, so my feeling of organic connection is not built on a muddle-headed and sentimental misunderstanding of how professional football works. This Wembley win belonged to me every bit as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas or George Graham (does Nicholas, who was dropped by Graham right at the start of the following season, and then sold, remember the afternoon as fondly?), and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it.

ARSENAL v LIVERPOOL

15.8.87

Because my partner is small, and therefore disadvantaged when it comes to watching football from the terraces, I gave my season-ticket away for the afternoon and bought seats high up in the West Stand for the first game of the new season. It was the afternoon that Smith made his début for Arsenal, and Barnes and Beardsley theirs for Liverpool, and it was hot, and Highbury was heaving.

We were level with the penalty spot at the Clock End of the ground, so we had a perfect view of the Davis diving header that equalised Aldridge’s opening goal, and a perfect view of the astonishing twenty-five-yard header from Nichol that gave Liverpool their winner in the very last minute; we could also see, with terrible clarity, the extraordinary behaviour of the Liverpool fans beneath us and to our right.

In his book on Barnes and race issues in Liverpool, Out of His Skin, Dave Hill only mentions that first game in passing (“Liverpool’s travelling supporters went home delighted, any doubts about the wisdom of the manager’s summer shopping spree already on the retreat.”). He pays more attention to Liverpool’s game a few weeks later against Everton at Anfield in the Littlewoods Cup, during which the away supporters chanted “Niggerpool! Niggerpool”, and “Everton are white!”. (Everton, mysteriously, still haven’t managed to find a black player good enough for their team.)

Yet Barnes’s first game did throw up information that Hill could have used, because we could see quite clearly, as the teams warmed up before the kick-off, that banana after banana was being hurled from the away supporters’ enclosure. The bananas were designed to announce, for the benefit of those unversed in codified terrace abuse, that there was a monkey on the pitch; and as the Liverpool fans have never bothered to bring bananas to previous Arsenal matches, even though we have always had at least one black player in the side since the turn of the decade, one can only presume that John Barnes was the monkey to whom they were referring.